


It Means (Life; What the Hell)

by lloydsglasses



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Episode: s10e01 The Pilot, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2017-04-19
Packaged: 2018-10-21 00:39:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10674090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lloydsglasses/pseuds/lloydsglasses
Summary: If the Doctor is honest with himself his promises felt small and unimportant when he was 23 million years in the future – when Bill stepped foot on alien ground for the first time and he watched the moment come alive in her smile.





	It Means (Life; What the Hell)

Perception is an odd thing. Sometimes the Doctor likes to think of eternity as a never-ending series of frozen moments; moments which will never themselves move from one place to another but which cause time to bend and stretch and shift as decisions are made and changed and re-made again. Nobody moves anywhere because it happens all at once; possibilities open and close over millennia and the Doctor feels all of them in the very core of his being, his twin hearts beating out a complete snapshot of time in its entirety.

It’s odd then, to perceive life in such a way and yet to remain in a place where time progresses in an exclusively linear fashion. His third self had known the feeling well, though when the Doctor thinks about it now he realises that was a laughably short experience. Back then he’d flown away in his TARDIS at the first opportunity, far more interested in witnessing the moments he could pick for himself rather than experience the slow, grinding progression of time as linear beings did.

He can’t do that, this go around. He has promises to keep.

It still chafes, just like it did the last time, but in some ways the Doctor finds himself fascinated. Experiencing time as an ongoing phenomenon is something he’s never before been able to grasp; seventy consecutive years on earth teach him that while it’s one thing to understand that humanity gradually changes as time ticks by, it’s another thing entirely to witness cultural and social change first-hand. 

It’s captivating.

He never directly gets involved – he has his promises, and they mean nobody can know that he’s here – but in 1963 he offhandedly mentions the bus boycott to a few of his students, offers them some of the cardboard that’s been piling up in his office, even lets a small group of them sit on his floor and turn cardboard into protest signs. They talk passionately and optimistically about things like change and equality, and in the corner of the room the Doctor completes his marking with a smile on his face.

In the late 60s he surprises himself by buying a little black and white television, absorbing culture and news in the way any ordinary human might. He develops routines of his own, the kind that he’s never taken the time to develop, which involve things like sitting down with Nardole and watching early BBC sketch comedy. He’s seen some of it before, obviously – _Monty Python’s Flying Circus_ will be celebrated and replayed for centuries to come – but he’s never understood the context in which it emerged, the linear progression of developing ideas and personalities that lead from a Cambridge student society to BBC Radio to _Do Not Adjust Your Set_ and _At Last the 1948 Show_. Society shifts as absurdism becomes entertaining and the Doctor experiences it all in a way he has never known.

Even so, his new understanding does nothing to stop the itch that starts up beneath his skin when the newsreels start playing footage of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.

It gets harder to restrain himself after that. He thinks about all the things his former self is doing at this very moment, bound to earth in a way that is similar to his current state but nevertheless running headfirst into adventure. He thinks about the lives he could alter with what he knows now, the people the Master killed before he could save them. He thinks about Sarah Jane asking him not to leave without her and wondering if she’d ever see him again. 

It would be so easy. _So easy._ He wouldn’t even need the TARDIS. He could just hop on a train and be where he most needed to be. But he has promises to keep, as Nardole’s quelling glances so frequently remind him. Besides, his own history is fixed and needs to remain that way, much as he might want to change parts of it. 

And so the Doctor sulks and plays guitar as he waits out the 1970s.

He watches the country become angry as the 70s slowly march on towards the 80s. He’s still careful not to get involved, but there are ways to feel like he is. Sometimes he lets a student address the room before he starts his lectures, lets them inform everyone less clued-up about protests and collections for striking miners. He teaches his undergraduates to question established constructs and ideas by assigning them Foucault and Derrida. By the end of the decade he has helped establish an LGB network for staff members and secured a bursary for a student whose parents cut off financial aid when they learnt about her plans to transition.

Time keeps on progressing, in that odd linear fashion he doesn’t think he’ll ever become accustomed to, and the spirit of protest seems to dry up somehow. Rolling news and the internet bring an oversaturation of facts and figures, and the humans stop paying attention in quite the same way. The Doctor soaks it all up and feels just as disillusioned as any human might; his urge to just run away in his TARDIS and find the moments in time where he can watch the fire of revolution come alive is stronger than ever before. One evening he gets as far as inputting the coordinates for 28th century China, which is when Nardole finds him. Their ensuing argument becomes so vicious that the Doctor ends up storming out and walking halfway across the city while he tries to calm his mind. He apologises later, because Nardole is his friend – one of the few real friends he has left, these days – and was only doing as he’d been asked. They both made promises, after all.

The Doctor takes to walking regularly after that. Whenever his blood itches with the desire to run and run and never look back he picks a place on his map of the city he’s never been to and heads towards it, takes in the houses, the people, the plant life and wonders how he can have stayed in any one place for over fifty consecutive years and still not know it in its entirety. He digs out a period-appropriate camera from the TARDIS storeroom and takes one new photograph with it every day, sticking the best ones up around his office. In his frozen snapshots the city transforms itself into something vibrant and proud, populated by balloons and street art and a harbour full of old ships. The Doctor witnesses it all one day at a time, one picture after another.

And then Bill wanders into his life, followed in short order by a shapeshifting puddle that won’t stop chasing her. And, well… That’s basically a ready-made excuse, isn’t it? The puddle isn’t a threat to the Vault and he can hardly let it keep chasing her.

He feels guilty about it later, when they’re back on Earth. _I have promises to keep,_ he protests when she asks him not to wipe her memories. And it’s true: he has made promises. He’s here for a reason. But if he’s honest with himself those promises felt small and unimportant when he was 23 million years in the future – when Bill stepped foot on alien ground for the first time and the Doctor watched the moment come alive in her smile.

So he lets her keep the memories. She runs when he tells her to, but after she’s gone a voice in the corner of his mind whispers that he could run with her.

Here then, lies a choice between one point and another. There are possibilities opening up that the Doctor can feel in the very core of his being, possibilities that he has always felt and will always feel. But right here, frozen in this one specific moment, snapshots of a potential life unfold before him in a linear progression from one consecutive moment to the next.

Time passes, and the Doctor comes alive.

**Author's Note:**

> Ooops I accidentally ficced again.
> 
> I initially wrote this because as of Saturday the Doctor has apparently spent 50-70 years as a professor at a university in Bristol, so really how could I resist? :P (The first draft actually had way more Bristol related things in, but they didn’t seem to fit properly in the end.)
> 
> Also, in case it is somehow not obvious, I _adore_ that speech about time the Doctor makes in this episode.  <3
> 
>  **Interesting things you may not know:**  
>  1\. The Bristol Bus Boycott is an actual thing that happened in 1963 and was a protest against the Bristol Omnibus Company who, at the time, refused to employ black or Asian bus crews.  There’s a pretty detailed post about it here, if you want to know more.  
> 2\. _Do Not Adjust Your Set_ and _At Last the 1948 Show_ were television sketch shows in the late 1960s which immediately preceded _Monty Python_. Both shows were written by and starred various different Pythons (along with other well known comedians such as David Jason and Marty Feldman).
> 
> As ever, come say hi on [tumblr!](http://lloydsglasses.tumblr.com) :)


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